How ProfNimrod started their logo design journey

Company name

Emergent Publications

Overview

I am a scientist/engineer living in Phoenix, Arizona. I do research into Complexity Theory (my personal website is kurtrichardson.com), and I also run ISCE Publishing, formerly the non-profit publishing division of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (ISCE). ISCE-P specializes in mainly academic books concerning the Science of Complexity. The current website is iscepublishing.com. The connection to ISCE is being severed and we are also wanting to launch a number of book series that repurposes our mainly academic content for a broader audience. Keywords for complexity are: emergence, collective intelligence (hence the Emergent Publications company name), self-organization, chaos, bottom-up, top-down, cooperation, process over content, coopetition, co-evolution, nonlinearity, pluralism. Examples of complexity in action are ant colonies, bee hives, crowd behavior, eco-systems, weather systems, teamwork, etc...

Tell us a bit about who you are and the people you reach

Our current target audience is mainly academics, but with our relaunch we're looking to also reach professionals, and readers interested in furthering their intellectual horizons.

Requirements

We need a new logo for Emergent Publications that may or may not share some of the features of the old (to be found at iscepublishing.com), like color scheme for example. Despite our focus on complexity we'd like something relatively uncomplicated (like any good logo I suppose). Some of the covers of our books are in color, but some are cloth, and so the logo will have to look good in color, but also as a goldleaf outline. The color version can have shading and color of course, but with color and shading effects removed, the remaining outline must still look OK as it will appear on the front cover of many books (hopefully!). 'Emergent' leads to some obvious images such as a bee hive, but we'd like to see some less obvious designs as well as the more obvious... the logo needs to somehow capture the balance between collectivism and individualism in shaping the world around us.